This is Marhgil Macuha's blog before he got his own self-hosted blog. He occassionally posts here, kapag natitripan. :)

Sunday, July 10, 2005

smart roaming email exchange

i'm safely back in the Philippines... saka na ang kwento about immigration. hehehe.

regarding this incident, i sent an E-mail to Smart Customer Care, nakaCC yung NTC...

eto yun...

To whom it may concern:

Hello!!!

Since when did you activate that Voice International Roaming Service? I was a frequent traveller and I used your SMS international roaming ever since. I was surprised yesterday that my phone rings, so I have to answer it, it was a client call from Kuwait. Now, I thought that it was all free and is part of your promotion until I found out in your website that incoming calls are charged Php50/minute!

What is this? You did not even sent us (international roamers) information that you activated the voice roaming for us and any incoming call will be charged 50pesos per minute! You should at least sent us SMS message about this.You cannot just activate a service without our knowledge and charge us for its usage immediately! This is illogical!!!

Activation of the service for existing roaming subscribers is also subscriber initiated. The command VROAM must be sent to 333 before the system can activate the service. As such, the service would not get activated unless the system receives a request from the subscriber or the sim-user.

All call transactions, both incoming and outgoing, are indeed charged to the roaming subscriber's account. Please refer below for the different rates:

These are all lies! It seems that you are implying that I requested for that feature. Can you show me a transaction log that I really requested for that feature???

FYI, I did not receive any such text broadcast last June 29. Maybe, you should check your systems. I asked my Smart user friends and they did not receive such message last June 29 too! Do you have records of all the numbers where you sent your text broadcast???

I left Philippines last June 30 and sent ROAM ON to 333 (I still have this on my sent items). I did not sent VROAM but you activated my voice roaming.

Your previous instructions on your website shows that to activate voice roaming, you have the same command, ROAM ON to 333, not VROAM. And now, that webpage is gone, it seems you felt that you did something wrong that you have to change the keyword???

I still believe that you activated the voice roaming feature without my knowledge and charge me for that call. I did NOT send VROAM! This is not correct and I should get a refund. Will you??

Anyways, I believe that I will not get a refund for this.But I just like you to know that this will not go unnoticed. You activated a feature which I did not request and charged me for it!!! This is wrong, this a fault in your system that you must change!

I hope NTC, and some columnists I cc'd here will do something about this. Don't activate any feature which your subscriber did not request, OK?